Americas: Why Bother With a Pre-Meeting Survey?

“We already know what we’re going to present at the meeting, and we know what attendees want to hear about.” How many times have you heard that from your internal meeting clients?

If, for a moment, you ask meeting owners to put on their marketing glasses and view the meeting as a customer experience, they might see things differently.

They might realize that the meeting experience is like a product that has to be designed to satisfy the real needs of the attendee/customers as well as the meeting owners. Maybe their marketing smarts would tell them they should do some pre-meeting customer research to make sure they get it right, that they really know (and not just assume) what their attendee/customers want and need from their meeting experience—at this point in time, in this culture, with all the real-world burning issues that they have to contend with and will for sure be bringing into the meeting with them.